Adventures in Web Development.

Start a Side Project

Whether you are a student looking for some career in web development or a developer
who have just started freelancing you should start a side project whether you
think you have the time or not. What’s important is that you start. It doesn’t matter
if you can’t make the time to commit to it every day or every week. Or maybe you have
the time to commit to it everyday but can only produce few lines of code.
All of these doesn’t matter, what’s important is that you start doing a side project.

Easier said than done right? Maybe you’re thinking what sort of project should I make?
Well my answer for that is that do you have any technology that you wish to learn but couldn’t
make time to learn it? That’s where your project is going to start. Maybe you’re a newbie
to JavaScript and you want to learn about it. It’s easy to grab a book and follow through it
but wouldn’t it be nice if you hit two birds with one stone? Building something while learning
the technology that you’re using to build that project.

Side projects are nice because they allow you to experiment all you want with the technologies
that you want to use on your project. There are no restrictions on what to use, the toolset choice is yours to make.
You can go crazy and use a combination of scripting languages together like Node.js and PHP.

You have all the time to make revisions to it if you think your code is sucky. There are no
deadlines. But of course it couldn’t go on forever. You must show it to the world at some point
and get some developers to look at your project. One good place to push your code is Github
but there are many others like bitbucket and gitorious
But bitbucket might be a better choice if you only want to show your project to selected people.
At the time of writing of this article, only public repos are free on Github, if you want to make it private
there’s a price that you have to pay while bitbucket allows private repos for the price of free.

So yeah I hope I’ve encourage at least a single soul out there to go ahead and start a side project.